Deep Sky Astrophotography

More Cygnus. I really love this region of sky, it's amazing. Tonight I've been getting image time on IC1318, IC1318B which are large nebulous regions, and NGC6910 which is a nice little open cluster nearby. The full frame of the 5D III is JUST AMAZING. It's more than twice as big as the 7D frame, and the images, once processed, are pretty stunning.

This is my first pass at processing a single-frame image of North America and Pelican nebulas in Cygnus, near the top star. Not entirely satisfied with it...I'd like to stretch it more, bring out some more detail, but I need to get a better handle on noise and color correction (a lot of the color correction routines end up making things noisier as they end up nuking most of the green color channel.)

KmGIoMu.jpg


Usually, getting this entire region requires a 4-panel mosaic with the smallish CCD sensors you can usually find for a reasonable price. Only those with the big money can get comparable full frame CCD cameras...which usually cost about $10,000 or more. I've got a cold box in the works for the 5D III, which should help get my dark current levels under control, and help me get better, deeper, less noisy subs (although still not as good as a cooled CCD...my cold box will probably only get me down to around -10°C, where as a good CCD can get you down to -25°C. With dark current doubling/halving every 5.8°C, a CCD is going to be about about 2.6x less noisy (and even better than that, really, as a mono CCD has a higher fill factor, no sparse color spacing, and CCDs designed for astro tend to have lower dark current to start with...)
 
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Jul 29, 2012
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jrista said:
More Cygnus. I really love this region of sky, it's amazing. Tonight I've been getting image time on IC1318, IC1318B which are large nebulous regions, and NGC6910 which is a nice little open cluster nearby. The full frame of the 5D III is JUST AMAZING. It's more than twice as big as the 7D frame, and the images, once processed, are pretty stunning.

This is my first pass at processing a single-frame image of North America and Pelican nebulas in Cygnus, near the top star. Not entirely satisfied with it...I'd like to stretch it more, bring out some more detail, but I need to get a better handle on noise and color correction (a lot of the color correction routines end up making things noisier as they end up nuking most of the green color channel.)

Awesome. Great shot jrista
 
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jrista said:
More Cygnus. I really love this region of sky, it's amazing. Tonight I've been getting image time on IC1318, IC1318B which are large nebulous regions, and NGC6910 which is a nice little open cluster nearby. The full frame of the 5D III is JUST AMAZING. It's more than twice as big as the 7D frame, and the images, once processed, are pretty stunning.

This is my first pass at processing a single-frame image of North America and Pelican nebulas in Cygnus, near the top star. Not entirely satisfied with it...I'd like to stretch it more, bring out some more detail, but I need to get a better handle on noise and color correction (a lot of the color correction routines end up making things noisier as they end up nuking most of the green color channel.)

KmGIoMu.jpg


Usually, getting this entire region requires a 4-panel mosaic with the smallish CCD sensors you can usually find for a reasonable price. Only those with the big money can get comparable full frame CCD cameras...which usually cost about $10,000 or more. I've got a cold box in the works for the 5D III, which should help get my dark current levels under control, and help me get better, deeper, less noisy subs (although still not as good as a cooled CCD...my cold box will probably only get me down to around -10°C, where as a good CCD can get you down to -25°C. With dark current doubling/halving every 5.8°C, a CCD is going to be about about 2.6x less noisy (and even better than that, really, as a mono CCD has a higher fill factor, no sparse color spacing, and CCDs designed for astro tend to have lower dark current to start with...)
Beautiful image jrista. What 'scope or lens are you using?
 
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jrista said:
More Cygnus. I really love this region of sky, it's amazing. Tonight I've been getting image time on IC1318, IC1318B which are large nebulous regions, and NGC6910 which is a nice little open cluster nearby. The full frame of the 5D III is JUST AMAZING. It's more than twice as big as the 7D frame, and the images, once processed, are pretty stunning.

This is my first pass at processing a single-frame image of North America and Pelican nebulas in Cygnus, near the top star. Not entirely satisfied with it...I'd like to stretch it more, bring out some more detail, but I need to get a better handle on noise and color correction (a lot of the color correction routines end up making things noisier as they end up nuking most of the green color channel.)

KmGIoMu.jpg


Usually, getting this entire region requires a 4-panel mosaic with the smallish CCD sensors you can usually find for a reasonable price. Only those with the big money can get comparable full frame CCD cameras...which usually cost about $10,000 or more. I've got a cold box in the works for the 5D III, which should help get my dark current levels under control, and help me get better, deeper, less noisy subs (although still not as good as a cooled CCD...my cold box will probably only get me down to around -10°C, where as a good CCD can get you down to -25°C. With dark current doubling/halving every 5.8°C, a CCD is going to be about about 2.6x less noisy (and even better than that, really, as a mono CCD has a higher fill factor, no sparse color spacing, and CCDs designed for astro tend to have lower dark current to start with...)
Stunning image!

Are you also going to remove the IR/UV cut filter from the 5D? ;D
 
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Thanks, guys. :)

Traingineer: I have no plans to mess with the 5D III. I use it for my bird, wildlife, and landscape photography, so I don't want to mess with it's ability to produce high quality, accurate color. I plan to buy a cooled mono Astro CCD soon enough, with a full set of LRGB and narrow band filters, which will trounce anything a modified 5D III, 6D, or any other modded DSLR could do. I expect, in the long run, to have a few cooled astro CCD cams. Different sensor sizes and types are useful for different things, some have huge sensors with lower sensitivity great for ultra wide field stuff, others have small sensors with insanely high sensitivity (77-90% Q.E.), great for deep narrow band imaging.

Bean: I use my Canon EF 600mm f/4 L II lens as a telescope right now.

Here is another image from Cygnus. Just took the subs for this last night, and just finished nearly six hours worth of integration/stacking and processing. This is the Sadr region of Cygnus, the close neighboring region to the North America/Pelican nebulas I shared before.

XjduLDm.jpg


There are multiple objects in this region. The Gamma Cygni region, comprised of IC1318 A, B, and C, also called the Butterfly Nebula by some, is in the lower middle. This one field also contains two open clusters, M29 and NGC6910. The bright star is Sadr, one of the primary stars that make up the constellation Cygnus itself. A big dust lane (unnamed, as far as I can tell) stretches through the center. A small double star near the lower right of that dust lane is also a reflection nebula...light from the blue star of the pair (barely discernible here) reflects off the dark dust. Another reflection nebula can be found in the upper left region just on the border of one of the darker areas (again too small to really be seen here).

As with most of my images, I was only able to gather about 1/3rd of the total subs I needed to get the best quality. All of my images have around 35-50 individual frames (subs) integrated. I need at least 100 subs to reduce noise to an acceptable level (100 subs averaged together reduces noise by SQRT(100), or 10x), and these days, with summer nighttime temps in the 70s, I probably need to reduce my noise levels by twice that. Problem is, to reduce noise by 20x, I would need 400 subs!! :p Hope to get some time this weekend to start building my cold box. I received my copper plate a couple days ago...so I can solder it together and put some insulation around it. Peltiers and voltage regulator are still on the way, and I need see if I can pull apart this indoor/outdoor thermometer to get myself a temperature sensor and readout screen that I can embed into the box. I'm hoping to be able to cool my camera to around -10°C. Compared to the 30-35°C it runs at right now, I should be able to reduce dark current noise by 6-7x.
 
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Another one, again from the Cygnus region. This massive region of our galaxy is just PACKED with amazing nebula, most of which are part of the monstrous Cygnus Molecular Cloud.

This time, Veil Nebula. Thought to be a remnant of a supernova, it certainly has some of the most intricate and delicate looking detail I've yet seen in a nebula. It's a bi-colored set of hydrogen-alpha filaments (red) veiled in oxygen sheathes (blue).

7oiPUxX.jpg


Going to work on getting some more data for this tonight, and I may be able to extract even more detail.
 
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Thanks Jrista for starting this thread it made finally get started setting my stuff back up. I haven't set my mount up in 4 years, moved and a permanent setup has always been on the to do list (but at the bottom). The long 4th weekend gave me time to unpack and setup temporally to tryout were I might want a permanent mounting. This is a wide field (about 75% crop) of the area around the Trfid and Lagoon nebulae. This is about the southern edge of my usable sky were I have it now. 84 frames at 800 iso, 30sec , 300 2.8l is , 5DIII, on an Atlus EQ-G processed with Images Plus. Alignment needs work but it has mostly been cloudy since.
 

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niteclicks said:
Thanks Jrista for starting this thread it made finally get started setting my stuff back up. I haven't set my mount up in 4 years, moved and a permanent setup has always been on the to do list (but at the bottom). The long 4th weekend gave me time to unpack and setup temporally to tryout were I might want a permanent mounting. This is a wide field (about 75% crop) of the area around the Trfid and Lagoon nebulae. This is about the southern edge of my usable sky were I have it now. 84 frames at 800 iso, 30sec , 300 2.8l is , 5DIII, on an Atlus EQ-G processed with Images Plus. Alignment needs work but it has mostly been cloudy since.

Fantastic image, niteclicks! :D
 
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niteclicks said:
Thanks Jrista for starting this thread it made finally get started setting my stuff back up. I haven't set my mount up in 4 years, moved and a permanent setup has always been on the to do list (but at the bottom). The long 4th weekend gave me time to unpack and setup temporally to tryout were I might want a permanent mounting. This is a wide field (about 75% crop) of the area around the Trfid and Lagoon nebulae. This is about the southern edge of my usable sky were I have it now. 84 frames at 800 iso, 30sec , 300 2.8l is , 5DIII, on an Atlus EQ-G processed with Images Plus. Alignment needs work but it has mostly been cloudy since.

You are welcome! I'm glad your participating. Your image is excellent! I've tried to image that target a couple times myself, but my view of the southern sky from my back yard is nearly completely blocked, and I have never been able to get the necessary subs. Your detail and color are great for 30-second subs, too! The f/2.8 aperture must be a DREAM! :D



Here is one of my latest. This time, it's Crescent nebula...also, as you might have guessed, in Cygnus. Cygnus is moving along pretty early on in the night now, crossing the meridian by about 11pm now, so unless I can figure out how to get some good imaging time on Tulip and/or Propeller nebulas (both also in the Cygnus molecular clouds), I may switch to a different target soon.

This image took a LOT of work. I've had to fight some technical issues with my tracking, which was actually caused by a few different things combined into one hellish problem. I also had persistent weather (it's been a COLD summer...temperatures are often in the 70's or below for days at a time, even as long as a week once...when usually we have temperatures in the mid to high 90's with more than a handful of days over 100), which has cut out a LOT of sky time.

Anyway, persistence finally paid off, allowing me to image Crescent Nebula, which itself is pretty well known...but also pull in a lot of the background nebulosity detail from the extensive molecular cloud in the Cygnus region of one of our galactic arms:

Yw8zCmb.jpg


The Crescent itself is quite complex, and actually has a very faint outer shell of mostly oxygen-based gasses that glows a faint blue (usually too dim for a DSLR to see, and generally requires some deep OIII narrow band exposure to bring it out...but I managed to reveal a little bit of it here):

qVJcD0f.jpg


Processed with PixInsight and Photoshop CC+Carboni's Astronomy Actions. See the full size version here:

 
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